The Wheel Inn, Old and New, Sedalia, Missouri

UPDATE MAY 18, 2014: WE WERE IN SEDALIA YESTERDAY, WHEELED IN TO THE WHEEL INN, AND DISCOVERED THE PLACE IS FOR SALE. APPARENTLY THEY'VE CLOSED. WHAT A SAD THING! As of May 18, 2014, this post, now, amounts to a memorial page for the Wheel Inn.

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Yes, the Wheel Inn lives on, and these days it’s right across the road from the Missouri State Fair. (You are going to the fair, right? August 12–22—you can’t miss it! Seriously, it is a good time, and in addition to meeting some talkative politicians, you’ll walk away with a bag full of free stuff. You might even get a free flyswatter!)

But the Wheel Inn, ahhh, the Wheel Inn. Venerable, beloved, local landmark that was destroyed when MoDot widened the intersection of Highways 50 and 65, the major arteries that fed the Wheel Inn’s first six decades of existence. Memories.




By September 2007, when the Wheel Inn closed its doors and auctioned off bits and pieces of its original, vintage signage and architecture, it had gotten dang difficult to “wheel in” to the Wheel Inn—at that busy intersection, we usually had to pull in and out of parking lots of adjacent businesses. And the parking lot had gotten tiny; easier with my Civic, but tricky with the truck. Highway expansion; lots of traffic.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more genuinely intact vintage drive-in that was so virtually unchanged since the 1940s. But it’s gone now. (Couldn't they have moved it? Alas.)




We were among the throngs of true devotees who visited the Wheel Inn during its last few weeks in business. Below are some pictures from that time (September 2007), including our last guberburger meal. Awww, dang it. What a cool place.










. . . But change happens. It could easily have been a tornado, you know? Or a fire! (Remember the original Old Heidelberg in Columbia? They had to completely rebuild—and it’s not the same—but that’s the way it goes. We love it still.) And this way, with the Wheel Inn, we all got a chance to say goodbye, and they could sell off mementoes to their biggest fans.


~ ~ But the Wheel Inn Lives! ~ ~



I had heard that there was a “new” Wheel Inn in Sedalia, a little farther south on Highway 65, and right across from the State Fairgrounds. To be honest, I was skeptical, and that was one reason I stayed away so long: “Who are you, and what makes you think you can replicate the Wheel Inn?” It seemed almost blasphemous. Sputter, sputter, sputter!

But even though the vintage architecture was a real treat and we miss it a lot, a business is much more than its building. And yes, the Wheel Inn tradition continues.

I’m pretty sure this is only the third set of owners; the first owners, Lyman Keuper and his wife, bequeathed the Wheel Inn to their daughter and son-in-law, Ruth Ann and Jack Hawkins, who owned the Wheel Inn until the building’s demise in 2007. John Brandkamp, who owned the business, sold the Wheel Inn name, recipes, and reputation to the current owner, Judy Clark, who had worked at the Wheel Inn off and on for forty-seven years.

And so the new Wheel Inn continues with the blessing of the old owners. The rest of the pictures in this post are of the new place.




I do hope they can find a talented artist to paint a new Guber-man on their windows; their current Guber-guys look really, um, computer-generated. Oh well.




They have a lot more seating, plus plenty of parking places! I’m not sure it’s much of a “drive in” anymore, but they have a big U-shaped service counter like the old place, they’ve stuck with the red-and-white color scheme and a retro “look,” and the recipes are all the same. Hallelujah!




There are a few new items on the menu—a fried chicken salad, for instance, and a couple of “big” burgers (the “Wheel Burger” has double cheese, double meat, plus the fixin’s; the “Whimpy Burger” has triple meat and triple cheese, which I think you should avoid, unless you want a triple bypass, too).

And stuff’s gone up. Prices are higher—but then that’s the way things go. It’s still very reasonable, and you can buy food here with the change on the floor under your car seat.

No kiddin’. You can get a grilled cheese sandwich for $2.25 (two slices of cheese!) or an egg sandwich for $2.50. I bet you’ve put more than that into a big-city parking meter. The most expensive thing on the menu is “Chicken BB” for $6.10. I don’t know what that is, and anyway, you probably came here to try something else. Right?




Yes. The pièce de résistance is the famous guberburger, the steakburger with peanut butter on it. Now, this is living.

I know what you’re going to say, but before you decide I’ve lost my mind, I urge you to try one first. They use a thin patty of fresh lean chuck, top it with hot melted peanut butter, and add lettuce, tomato, and salad dressing (Miracle Whip).

The Wheel Inn is where it all began. Here’s how it happened.






Back in 1946, Lyman Keuper, the owner of the Wheel Inn, was approached by a fellow who was impressed by his curly fries (they’re called Soozie-Q Fries, by the way). They are really, really curly, and they’re thin. They’re fun to eat, and they look great.




So this fellow proposed a trade: You tell me how you make Soozie-Q fries, and I’ll give you the secret for making the best burgers ever—irresistibly delicious burgers that will make your business a sure success. . . . And the deal was made.

The guberburger became the Wheel Inn’s specialty, beloved by generations of Missourians headed to the state fair, or Kansas Citians on their way to the Lake, bikers, or any number of other folks passing through on the two highways. And they were all telling their friends, “You’ve gotta try it to believe it. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s really good!”




Now—you can get “guberburgers” elsewhere in Sedalia, like Eddie’s Drive In (which we also love), but my waiter the other day assured me that there is a secret ingredient (besides the peanut butter) used in Wheel Inn’s guberburgers that makes them unique, and extra delicious. So go there, my friends, and enjoy the Real Thing.

The moral of this story is, Change happens. But if you’re lucky, the stuff that really matters, like the Original Guberburger, continues on.

(Oh, and make sure you get the Soozie-Q fries with your guberburger!)

Friendly Prairie and Paint Brush Prairie

Hi there! We had another nice little impromptu adventure Sunday, late afternoon. After Sue got home from a meeting in Columbia, we relaxed for a while in the backyard, enjoying ourselves, the birds, and some iced mint tea, but soon decided on a little road trip. Cameras included!

We headed west, young man! We drove to one of our favorite Central Missouri destinations, for when we want to get away from it all: Sedalia. Specifically, the prairies south of it.

It’s about an hour’s drive on Highway 50 from Jeff to Sedalia (or “Sedville,” as we like to call it, which apparently was the town’s first name, before they landed on the more euphonious “-alia” ending, so trendy in the middle 1800s).

The two prairies we usually visit are both about nine miles south of Sedalia on Highway 65. Both are off of Manila Road—look at my links for maps, or you can just rely on the brown Conservation Area signs right before the turn-off onto this gravel road.

The smaller of the two prairies is about 1.5 miles to the west: Friendly Prairie Conservation Area. It’s forty acres of genuine unplowed remnant prairie, owned by the Missouri Prairie Foundation (MPF), and jointly managed by the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC).

Get this! Botanists have identified more than 260 species of plants on this forty acres. This is biodiversity in action; think of the zillions of interactions of plants, insects, herbivores, insectivores, fungi, saprophytes, parasites, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals!




Compare that to forty acres of a crop plant, say, corn. Monoculture. The entire, vibrant, diverse community is gone; all that’s left are bugs that care about corn, and the specific birds and mammals that care about those bugs and/or corn, and which can survive despite the annual plowings and the pesticides humans apply.

*Sigh.*

Okay, and the second prairie we visited was Paint Brush Prairie Conservation Area, right off the east side of Highway 65. It’s got 314 acres, more than two hundred plant species, and is owned by the MDC. It’s notable for being a home to some federally endangered species, such as Mead’s milkweed.

Greater prairie-chickens live there, too, and if you want to see them, you better hurry, because there probably won’t be any of them left in our state after another twenty years or so.

There was a sign at the parking area telling hunters not to shoot them. The sign said something like, “Learn how to tell a bobwhite from a prairie-chicken. Prairie-chickens are BIG.” (Sometimes I think that if people are that oafish and dumb, maybe we don’t deserve to live in a world blessed by prairie-chickens.)

While we were there, we didn’t see any prairie-chickens. But we did see some Henslow’s sparrows. They, too, are declining—like the prairie-chickens, they are literally losing ground.

Other birds we saw on this trip, seen on fenceposts and nearby farms, included a loggerhead shrike (a nifty-cool-gee-whiz kind of bird—look it up) and several scissor-tailed flycatchers (which simply take my breath away).

Honestly, for a natural history geek like me, the prairie is a place to make discoveries! I only need to walk a few steps, and boom! Another cool plant to crouch down and inspect.




This time of year, the prairie is just starting to green up beneath last season’s layer of golden stalks. The wildflowers are getting started. Right now is the time for all the shortest of plants to bloom and have their heyday, because the tallgrass prairie species like big bluestem, which easily reaches six or seven feet tall, quickly outpace things like . . . little violets.




Indeed, we spied violets out there on the prairie! Arrow-leaved violets, Viola sagittata, to be precise, though the diagnostic leaves were hard to see on account of last year’s dried grasses the plants have to poke through.


Other low-growing plants in bloom included wild strawberry (Fragaria virginiana), pussy toes (an Antennaria species), and even small bluets (Houstonia pusilla). There was lots of false garlic (Nothoscordum bivalve) blooming, too, and those tiny lilies are short and delicate—you don’t see those from the road!

Yellow star grass (Hypoxis hirsuta) was spreading its six bright yellow tepals, but it didn’t seem very abundant. Maybe it’s just getting started.




Another plant that seemed to be just getting warmed up was the iconic prairie plant Indian paintbrush (Castilleja coccinea).




It is remarkable how you can look clear out across an early spring prairie, and it seems all dry and tan, but when you start wandering through it, out pop these incredibly bright specimens.




By the way, remember when I told you how, in about 2000, the botanists had “blown up” the family Scrophulariaceae? Well, Indian paintbrush is one of the species that was affected by this change. Most of your plant guidebooks published before 2000 will tell you that it’s in the scrophs family, along with penstemons, figworts, and snapdragons, but now Indian paintbrush has been placed in the Orobanchaceae (orro-ban-KAY-see-ee). (See, I’m trying to help you make sense of these terms.)

The Orobanchaceae is often referred to as the “broomrape” family, which sounds pretty horrible, until you understand the etymology: Rape, or rapum, is an ancient word for a turnip or some other tuber, and broom’s “other” meaning refers to a shrubby plant in the pea family. So broomrape actually means “broom tuber” and refers to the way these plants grow swollen underground structures connected to a host plant’s roots.

See, a common highlight to many plants in the broomrape family is that most are at least partially parasitic to other plants. Their roots connect with the roots of other plants—such as a big, vigorous sunflower or birch tree nearby—and steal nutrients from that host.

And lo and behold, we found several specimens of another member of this same family, wood betony, sometimes called “lousewort” for the now-laughable belief that this plant could give cattle lice. Its official name is Pedicularis canadensis.

(If you’re reading this and you’re in the Rockies, Cascades, High Sierra, Canada, and parts north, you might be familiar with a noteworthy relative, P. groenlandica, “elephant’s head,” whose flowers look like tiny pink elephant heads. Google it if you don’t believe me. I kid you not.)

Anyway, wood betony is one of those plants that intrigues even folks who are really more interested in animals. The foliage is remarkably fernlike and dissected. Attractive.




The inflorescences (flower stalks) are marvels of symmetry and detail. Each conical flowerhead grows in a compact swirl. It’s all so orderly yet chaotic in a way. It looks more like something you might find stuck to a coral reef than growing out in the middle of some sunny grassland.




Finally, I want to leave you with a picture of another plant that’s currently blooming well on both prairies: Hoary puccoon, Lithospermum canescens. It’s in the borage family, and if you look beyond the pretty petals at the stalk they’re growing on, you can kinda see the “fiddlehead” growth pattern of the flowers (this is technically called a “scorpioid cyme”) that is characteristic of this family.




So the wildflower season is just getting started down there, south of “Sedville,” and I’m encouraging you, too, to wander through the grasses and see what kind of botanizing you can do. Bring a wildflower guidebook. And bring your camera!




By the way, there’s a patch of trout lilies, or dogtooth “violets,” on one of these prairies that will probably be blooming within this next week. But I’m not telling you where. You’ll have go to discover them yourself. Heh-heh-heh!